Ulead Photo Explorer 8.0

[Mick B]

For many years now ( the instruction booklet is dated 2002 !) I have used this program to download all my photos from a card reader. I organise them all in folders by year and by the month. While the program can be used for editing, I use it purely for storage and viewing only only as it is easy to use. A simple right click and I can send any image to any editing software, which is mostly Photoshop Elements 9. I do use a 2 TB external hard drive and regularly check to make sure everything is backed up.
The system requirements are for MS Windows 98, 2000 or XP. Recently I got a new computer running Windows 7 and the program doesn't run as smooth as it used to, mainly running slow.

I was wondering if there is a similar lightweight program I could use. I'm not a big fan of M/S Pictures or Elements Organiser. Maybe I just need some to spend some time with Organiser ?
Also is it safe to run my ULead program in what they call "Compatibility Mode" as I am not sure about doing that. Before this (back in 2000 when I paid $1200 !! for a 2.1 MP Canon Ixus I used Zoom Browser which soon became known as "Doom Browser". I also have the disc for that as it came with my Canon 500D but have not installed it.

What program do you use ?

[ameerat42]

Dunno if you'd call it lightweight, but I use (admittedly just a few features of) ACDSee 5. It's a quite old version, but I got it free as part of a licence update years ago and haven't bothered to pay for an update. It's pretty nifty in that it can even pull an image from my Sigma raw files and show them in the catalogs.
Am.

PS: I meant to say I generally agree with all your reasons about the other progs.

[Kaktus]

I am still a beginner, but I've used Faststone Image Viewer for some time now. It works equally well on Win XP and Win 7. You can also send any picture to any external program with one click.
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

Here is a review and details of it on Cnet
http://download.cnet.com/FastStone-I...-10324485.html

[Speedway]

There is usually no problem running in compatability mode. I still use an old Ulead program "Photo Express 3" for watermarking my photos and adding text as the interface for this is very simple and works well. The program dates back to 1998 and came with my first canon scanner.
Keith.

[Mick B]

Thanks all for your replies. After downloading trials of about 6 different programs and playing with them all I have finally decided to go with Faststone as Kaktus suggested and have now finished transferring all of my 20,500 images from ULead. I will leave Ulead there for a little while until I know everything is safe though ! The only thing I'm not keen on with Faststone is that when I'm looking through galleries which have RAW images in there as well as the jpeg I get to see both (Ulead used to store the RAWs but would skip past them in the viewer). I can view all the jpegs and then the RAW files, but they get out of order. Still and all I'm happy now that I have a good program to view my images and it works well without bogging down. Now all I have to do is to be ruthless and dump 50% of what I have kept over the years ...................... but you never know when I might want that old one of the close up of the cat's ear !